Cleanup options considered for toxic lake

VALLEY SPRINGS - If toxic mine waste sites could have emotions, then poor little Poison Lake would probably be jealous of its celebrity cousin, Penn Mine.

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By Dana M. Nichols

recordnet.com

By Dana M. Nichols

Posted Aug. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By Dana M. Nichols

Posted Aug. 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

VALLEY SPRINGS - If toxic mine waste sites could have emotions, then poor little Poison Lake would probably be jealous of its celebrity cousin, Penn Mine.

Penn Mine was once a booming industrial site and in retirement became a famous environmental disaster, killing fish by the thousands, sparking lawsuits, making headlines and eventually requiring more than $16 million in cleanup costs.

But just a mile to the east on the Amador County side of Camanche Reservoir, the Poison Lake Pond Complex has released its arsenic, cadmium and other toxic metals in obscurity.

Perhaps the final humiliation for Poison Lake came Thursday night, when officials with the Bureau of Land Management and the East Bay Municipal Utility District called a public meeting in a building next to Pardee Reservoir to discuss proposals for cleaning the site.

Only two members of the public showed up.

"Unless you have an airplane, you don't know it's there," said Daryl Baylor, who was one of the two attendees.

Baylor knows about Poison Lake because his family has owned the adjoining property since the early 1900s.

"We've been playing out there since I was a child," Baylor said.

Holly Trejo, a geologist and consultant whose firm was hired by the BLM to investigate the site, said that when she went door to door in the area, Baylor's family members were the only ones who knew about Poison Lake.

While the site not far from Buena Vista Road is obscure, engineers say it does have enough concentrated toxins to pose a hazard to human health, animals and, when heavy rains wash the sediment down a gully, the waters of Camanche Reservoir.

More than a million people in the Bay Area drink that water.

So although the waste is not a Penn Mine-level urgent disaster, officials with EBMUD and the BLM want to clean it up. The highest, most toxic of the three ponds is on BLM land, while sediment downstream washes through two other ponds on EBMUD land before reaching Camanche.

Trejo and her peers evaluated six different options for the cleanup. Simply removing all the sediment and trucking it to a landfill was the most expensive at $5.7 million and had drawbacks, such as creating a lot of traffic for neighbors to endure and possibly affecting the Ione manzanita, an endangered plant species that lives near the site.

The cheapest option, just posting "Keep Out" signs, didn't solve the potential for the toxins to get into the lake or to affect wildlife.

What the engineers are recommending is to leave the two lower ponds alone, since vegetation now covers them, effectively preventing the sediment from moving. At the upper pond, under the recommended option, the toxic sediment would be put into a mound and covered with a heavy plastic membrane and a layer of clay to keep water from penetrating. That option would cost about $2 million.

When the work might take place is uncertain. For the next month, officials will accept public comments on the proposed plan. After that, they would have to come up with a design and seek funding.

Peter Graves, the BLM lead for hazardous-materials matters in California, said it is possible work could start next year, but it is unlikely.